Veni, Vidi, Vici
by ViridianPanther
Summary: 'The Aperture opened. The Aperture closed. For a moment, the sky appeared to fold in on itself, before expelling a flash of livid red light.' Mass Effect 3 alternate ending. Assumes mostly paragon male Shepard w/ Kaidan romance.
1. Kastchei's Spell is Broken

"The paths are open, but _you_ have to choose."

Shepard blinked, and nodded. His vision blurred and rocked, and a flare of sunlight caught his eye. He opened his mouth to say something, but the breath caught and he couldn't produce any sound.

By his own (impaired) judgment, Shepard was probably dehydrated, exhausted and certainly losing blood. He could smell iron. Any last stand would be feeble, and would have to be done quickly.

"How do I know," Shepard finally managed to croak, "that you're not lying to me?"

The child's image remained static, unmoving. Was it thinking? Considering how best to bluff?

"I don't understand," it said, finally (_it_, Shepard reminded himself—it was just a projection.) "I have offered you a choice."

"How do I know," Shepard repeated, "that destroying you will end the cycle?"

"Destroying the Crucible will destroy us," the child said. "It will also destroy the Citadel. It will destroy me, and I control the Reapers."

"But it'll destroy every synthetic in the galaxy." Shepard rolled his eyes upwards. "It's not often you get invited to commit genocide."

"Genocide, it may be," the child said, its face gazing pointedly upwards at Shepard's. "But the choice is yours."

Shepard squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again. His head was throbbing and beginning to feel lighter and lighter. There was something _wrong_ about this, but he could not fathom what it was.

"I… why me? Why my choice?"

"Because you are special, Commander Shepard." The hologram flared a bright blue. "You were the first human to know about us. You were chosen by the beacon on Eden Prime. _You_ brought this fight to us—"

"No, _no!_" Shepard interrupted. "I wasn't chosen by the beacon. It went for whoever was closest. If I hadn't moved Ash it would just as easily have been—"

He stopped dead as he remembered the beacon. Remembered the sensation of being dragged towards it, the horror of the visions, the howling in his ears, the force of the explosion.

And, for some reason, he remembered this place.

This tremendous open space, its giant walkways, the shimmering column of light. The structures were suddenly familiar to Shepard, and he understood every one of them in minute detail, even though he could not understand why.

_"The choice is yours…"_

The child's voice suddenly felt distant, barely perceptible, and certainly not worth paying attention to. He found himself consumed, instead, by an urgent and pressing need to find a spiral ramp.

_"Commander!"_

Spiral ramp, spiral ramp—he had no idea why, or how, but he sensed a spiral ramp was the way to go, the way to fire this thing and get it over with.

_"Shepard!"_

Gingerly, Shepard turned about, and found himself making gentle footsteps towards the right. A spiral ramp—just as he'd remembered from somewhere. The endorphins were beginning to wear off, and it was only now that he began to sense the utter agony in his right leg, his abdomen, the burning sensation and smell of clotting blood on his left arm.

_"Shepard. I am unable to raise Admiral Hackett."_

He looked back for a moment, down to the catwalk he'd come from. The child was nowhere to be seen. The ramps leading off to the sides had also vanished.

_"Normandy to Shepard, Normandy calling Shepard. Come in, please."_

Shepard pressed on upwards, shuffling forwards one foot at a time, steadying himself with his arms when he felt himself falling. The pistol he'd been holding fell to the floor, slid away and vanished into the abyss.

_"Shepard, this is Normandy, come in, please."_

It was becoming harder now. Steeper. Shepard gritted his teeth and groaned as he pushed down on his right foot.

_"Normandy to Shepard, please respond."_

He let out a cry of pain and tumbled forward, face-first on to an open platform—he'd made it. End of the ramp.

_"Shepard, please report. Are you injured?"_

"I've had better days," he slurred, tasting iron.

_"I am dispatching medical assistance,"_ EDI announced. _"Are you any closer to being able to fire the Crucible?"_

"Um…" Shepard hauled his torso upright using his good arm, and peered around. "I think…"

All that was here was a vast transparent platform, stretching in all directions for what seemed like forever, with a white spot in the centre where that column of energy met the glass.

For some reason, that spot, a circle around a metre in diameter, seemed immediately inviting. Demanding to be touched, to have something placed upon it.

"I think I can see—" Shepard began, as he recalled that moment from the beacon where he imagined being stood upon a pillar of light.

It was then that realisation dawned.

"Oh."

_"I'm sorry, say again?"_

Shepard blinked, looked down, looked up, and began thinking about getting back on his feet. "I think," he coughed into his radio, "I understand what we're missing now."

That child wasn't the Catalyst—there was no way it could've been. Why would the Protheans build their arch-nemesis into the design for a super weapon designed to destroy it? They'd known more about the Reapers, about the star-child, than the Council could have dreamed of. They had understood the Crucible's ancient designs, iterated, improved them, and been _so close_ to firing it, and Shepard could remember exactly how, and precisely why. He understood the design of the Crucible, its elegance, in minute detail.

Shepard now understood. He understood everything from that beacon on Eden Prime, the reason it exploded immediately afterwards, the knowledge it had planted in him, visceral and subliminal.

"It's me," Shepard said, painfully pushing himself to his feet. "I'm the template. I _am_ the Catalyst."

EDI paused for two seconds. An age in computer time. _"Please clarify."_

"The Prothean beacon… I was…"

_"There is no need to clarify further, Commander,"_ EDI interrupted, suddenly. _"I believe I understand now."_

Shepard stumbled ahead, and found himself yelping in agony as he approached the target.

"I have no idea what'll happen when I… um…"

_"Nor do I,"_ EDI chirped. _"I believe you are right, though."_

"If I don't make it," Shepard gurgled, "please—"

_"I believe you'll make it."_ EDI's voice was in 'serious' mode—this was not one of her jokes. _"You are quite the expert at defying death, Shepard."_

He inhaled deeply, and thought carefully about what he was going to say next.

"I'm not so sure, this time," Shepard croaked. He was directly on the edge, now—one step from that bright white circle. Part of him felt fear, and part felt longing for blessed relief from the agony of a human body. "But thank you, anyway."

_"You're welcome,"_ EDI said—did he detect a tint of solemnity in her voice? _"Good luck, Commander."_

Shepard blinked, and found his eyes stinging, vaguely aware of a single tear rolling down his cheek. At once, he was glad he hadn't taken up the Catalyst's—no, the Reapers'—offer of genocide. He was glad for every damn decision in his life, for every person he'd helped, for every friend he'd made.

And he was glad he was here now. Glad that he had surety—finally—that the cyclical rape of life in this galaxy would be brought to an end.

As he looked upward one final time at the Earth, at the continents, the weather systems, Shepard remembered the sense of wonder he'd had upon seeing it from space for the first time.

And, as he basked in its beauty, with one final _push_, Commander Shepard stepped over the threshold.

The change was immediately noticeable, but gradual. Shepard felt warmer; there was a vaguely electrical feeling that caused his hair to stand on end.

His fingers tingled. Looking down at them, he saw the skin on his palms begin to glow. First a pale yellow, then bright orange, then piercing red: the warmth was now almost unbearable, but he remained stood still, his legs slightly apart.

The heat rose in his face, and Shepard heard a squealing noise over the silence: the Crucible was activating, charging.

Feeling pressure soaring in his throat, he clasped his hands together instinctively. It was as if he needed to sneeze: an unbearable, painful, pent-up explosion was building in Shepard's body.

He felt himself hyperventilating, bursting, taking pained breaths. And he was unable to hold it any longer.

With one last, deep breath, Commander Shepard pointed his clenched hands skyward, and exploded in a blaze of crimson light.


	2. One by One

The Aperture opened. The Aperture closed.

For a moment, the sky appeared to fold in on itself, before expelling a flash of livid red light. A thunderous roar shattered the eardrums of millions, and the shockwave tore apart the Amazon rainforest, which had been directly in the focus of the Crucible's energies.

For around ten seconds, Planet Earth experienced hell. Then, as quickly as it had gone, silence once again fell.

On the streets of London, the sounds of growling, hooting Reapers suddenly ceased.

One by one, their headlamps flickered out, the terrible red eyes vanishing into their bodywork, with motion stopping dead. And, slowly, they began to succumb to the inescapable force of gravity, their own artificial mass fields causing their legs to crumple like paper.

One by one, Reapers began to fall across London, toppling, some crashing into landmarks, others causing tremendous bores in the river. One teetered above St. Paul's, and, with a gentle _crash_, rolled down the riverbank, demolishing parts of Blackfriars and sliding neatly into the Thames below the Millennium Bridge.

One by one, the streets of London fell silent. Soldiers rushed to inspect the shells. Some ran to their injured comrades, tearing open packs of medi-gel and activating their omni-tools.

One by one, the cities, the towns, the ancient fields of Planet Earth became peaceful.

And, one by one, for one moment, every star and every planet in the Milky Way fell silent.

And on the superstructure known to some as the Crucible, a group of soldiers filed, one by one, up the spiral ramp to the firing point.

The Catalyst—their comrade—was sprawled across the glass floor, his body singed, charred, broken by the force of this and all the battles before it, but otherwise alive. The tools on their arms lit up and scanned for signs of life.


	3. Locus

"Commander Shepard?"

Admiral Shepard ignored the incorrect rank, and tried to remember the child's name.

"Lucy, isn't it?" He'd seen her a couple of times now, with her two brothers, chasing what must have been the family's dog around the field.

"When you were little, was your mommy mean to you?"

Shepard felt his brow furrow. "I'm sorry?"

"My mommy won't let me have a go on Shaun's bike."

He remained baffled. "You want to know if my mommy was mean to me?"

"I thought," the little girl said, "she must be really mean because she gave you a silly name like Shepard."

It took the Admiral a moment or two to process what Lucy had proposed.

"Shepard isn't my first name," he said, incredulous, "it's my surname."

"Is that a name that only men have?"

"No, everyone has a surname. Boys and girls."

Lucy looked confused for a moment, but smiled when she devised a solution.

"Why doesn't everyone just have one name?"

"Because there's lots of people," Shepard said, determined to get around this child's reasoning, "and some people have the same name."

Lucy looked out to sea for a little bit, processing this new-found information. Then:

"Did your mommy give you two names and one leg, instead of the other way round?"

"No, no!" Shepard said, trying to hide a morbid smirk behind a vaguely paternal smile. "_Everyone's_ got two names. I just lost one of my legs."

"Where did you lose it?"

"It was a very long time ago." This was new—fourteen years after the event, Shepard was more than used to having the details of his odd semi-cybernetic nervous system, and its side effects, probed into by documentary-makers, historians, computer scientists and gossip publications. But children were a new audience. "It's very complicated, grown-up stuff."

There was a shout from the distance, and Lucy turned her head. Her mother, Shepard assumed. Thank god—he didn't want to have to explain a galactic war and cybernetic incompatibility to a four-year-old.

"What's your first name, Shepard?" she asked, suddenly.

Shepard smiled, and humoured her. "That's a secret. No-one's called me by my first name in years."

"I can keep a secret," Lucy grinned, moving beside his wheelchair and presenting her ear.

Unable to argue, Shepard whispered something to the girl. She watched her face—confusion at first, puzzlement, followed by the slow grin of an "a-ha" moment.

"Thank you!" she beamed, turning and rushing back to her mother. That girl would go far, Shepard hoped. Maybe she'd even tolerate having to wait a few years until being allowed to ride a bicycle.

Shepard briefly thought about how nice it'd be to be able to ride a bicycle again, but stopped, knowing he'd only make himself miserable. He returned to his previous occupation: gazing to the west, and the magnificent sunset. This world was called Locus for the exquisite path its sun, Athene, took through the sky every twenty-six hours: rose in the east from behind a tidally-locked moon, Clarence, and sank in the evenings behind a stunning blue-green gas giant.

The climate was maritime, and they were perpetually bathed in the light of Athene or Clarence, if not both. Shepard was a perpetual agnostic, but he'd always assumed that if there was a heaven, it'd look something like Locus.

Kaidan trudged up the cliff path to meet him after around half an hour. He was fresh from the train home, with his grey Alliance-issue tunic unbuttoned, and looking flustered. "I swear the Secretary General wants my head on a plate."

"Uh-oh. Which one this time?"

"Alliance, of course. My budget's been cut again."

"Ouch." Shepard knew that was the third round of budget cuts in as many months: the biotics research division (of which Kaidan was head) was on the "high cost, high risk" register. The glut in the materials and construction markets following the destruction of the Reapers couldn't last forever, and they eventually needed to find money from somewhere.

"Money's more trouble than it's worth, sometimes," Kaidan said, squatting and taking Shepard's hand in his own. "How was your day?"

"I just lied to a small child," Shepard said, grateful for something more interesting to talk about than wheelchair quirks and crossword puzzles.

"You did what?"

"Lucy, I think it was."

"Jill Carter's girl?"

"Yeah, that's the one," Shepard said. "She asked me if I was called Shepard because my mother was mean."

Kaidan laughed. "That's a new one. What did you tell her?"

"I had to explain what a surname was." He glossed over the question about his missing leg. "I then told her my first name was a secret."

"Secret, my ass," Kaidan scoffed. "Go on?"

"Yup. It just seemed more interesting than the truth." The dull truth was that on joining the Alliance, someone in his squad had shared his forename, and, on finding he liked being called by his surname, Shepard had let it stick. Even Kaidan used his surname: the only people who called him by his first name were journalists fishing for an interview. "Of course, she then wanted to be let in on the big secret."

"Did she, now?"

"Yep." Shepard found himself yawning. Athene was now well and truly sunk behind the giant viridian disk in the sky. "Shall we be heading back?"

"Yeah, let's."

Shepard turned his wheelchair around and entered Pendragon Street as their destination. It was only around half a kilometre along the coastal path, and mostly flat, so hopefully he wouldn't have to reverse himself out of a gully on the way.

"Did you tell her, in the end?" Kaidan asked.

"I lied. I said my first name was Kaidan, of course."

"Why?"

"To help me make a point," Shepard said. "You have two people called Kaidan, what do you need to discriminate between them?"

A surname. "Of course," Kaidan grinned. "Very clever."

"You're damn right," Shepard said, holding tight to the armrest and grimacing as the wheelchair rocked over a bump in the path.

* * *

><p>"What's this?"<p>

Shepard handed over the computer, and watched Kaidan's eyes as he scanned it.

"'Oh, fair Locus where / The sky is always clear and fair / The sun rides gaily, daily across the sky / Between the fair orbs on high'—god, Shepard," Kaidan said, his eyes wide with something between amusement and horror. "I didn't have you down as a poet."

"I was sick of brain teasers," Shepard said, taking the computer back and scrolling through _Sky of Locus_ with one thumb. "What do you think?"

"Would you like me to be polite," Kaidan asked, slipping a nightshirt over his head, "or be honest?"

"It's not good, is it?"

"Frankly, my dear, it's dreadful. Ash is probably spinning in her grave."

Four seconds of crushing silence followed, and Kaidan immediately felt awful for saying that.

"Sorry," he blurted, quickly. "That was unnecessary."

"Mhmm." Shepard placed the computer on the bedside table, sliding it further along when he noticed he'd placed it on top of the clock projector.

"Listen," Kaidan said, sitting down on the bed and stroking Shepard's jawline with his forefinger. "I've been thinking about my position."

"Thinking what?"

"Well," Kaidan said, "if Douglass"—Nicole Douglass, the Alliance's new Secretary General—"gets her way, the biotics department as we know it will basically cease to exist. And I'm not sure I can justify…"

He ran out of words, unable to provide a valid reason beyond the one that really mattered. "Basically," he said, "I don't give a damn about testing eezo consistencies and implant firmware when I can stay here and make you feel a little better."

Kaidan could sense Shepard was getting ready to argue, to urge him not to throw away his career. So typical of him. He kissed Shepard's temple and laid down beside him. "Listen, Shepard. I love you and I want you to be happy. That's all that matters to me."

That made him smile. That rare, odd, goofy smile that didn't fit with the hardened facial features and the bright blue eyes and made Kaidan melt on the inside as they moved closer for a kiss. "Thank you, Kaidan." Shepard suddenly reached for a tissue and sneezed into it with an exceptionally loud grunt. "Sorry. I've been feeling like crap all week."

"Mhmm." Kaidan squeezed his eyes open and shut; he was certain he could feel a migraine coming on, but kept quiet about it as he pulled the bed cover over them, and slipped behind Shepard, sliding his hands up his shirt and holding him loosely. Fourteen years had taught Kaidan that he liked that.

Fourteen years.

Shepard had been one-legged ever since the Crucible. Usually, amputees would be fitted with a prosthetic leg by the next week. A small organ, such as a kidney, could be cloned in a month. More complex organs, eyes, fingers, genitals and the like, took around two months. Large replacement body parts, as a rule, took no more than six months.

The complex (and undocumented) nature of the Cerberus cybernetics, however, had conspired against him.

Both cloned human legs and prosthetic limbs had been rejected by Shepard's immune system. Those that could be tamed by the use of immunosuppressants simply wouldn't work: attempts to induce muscle movement simply resulted in twitches and incoherent spasms.

It had taken fourteen years, and they were still nowhere near fully understanding the odd, clumsily reverse-engineered circuitry in Shepard's right pelvis. And God knew they'd been waiting long enough.

Kaidan could only hope, dream, and pray to non-specific deities that one of the replacements would work before too much longer. The physical appearance didn't bother him so much: as far as he was concerned, Shepard would always be unequivocally beautiful, inside and out. The effects of being confined to a wheelchair, though, were clear for anyone to see.

Even accounting for his slowly advancing age, Shepard looked old. His hair was thinner, his eyes sunken, his skin pale.

The thing that worried Kaidan most, though, was the saturnine bent that had grown over many years. He could see it in Shepard's face, his eyes, every time he went over a bump in the wheelchair, or had to be helped with menial daily tasks, or when coming home in the middle of the day to see him anaesthetising himself with thinking puzzles, extranet browsing and other idle distractions.

It was a forlorn grimace of depressive frustration and indignity. And there was nothing either of them could do about it, except wait, and keep each other company to feel better about it all.

Even that was becoming more difficult. Most of the time, Shepard was either tired or felt ill in some way. Kaidan could tolerate the inevitable sexual frustration, but he could nonetheless sense the misery and drudgery of Shepard's existence rubbing off on him.

Responsibility had made them both old men. With the amount of organs he'd had replaced (he was on his third heart by now, including the synthetic one from Cerberus) Shepard could just as easily have been ninety years old, rather than forty-four (forty-five, next week—he should probably think about finding a good bottle of wine from somewhere.)

Kaidan had been drafting his resignation mail in his head for a week or so. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd write it up and send it in. He wasn't relishing the prospect of abandoning his research team, but they knew him well enough to understand. _I should've resigned years ago,_ he told himself.

He waved out the lights and took another look around. Shepard was out, breathing long, slow, shallow breaths with his mouth hanging slightly open.

It reminded him uncomfortably of how he'd looked after activating the Crucible, collapsed, spread-eagled, face singed and armour blown away. Kaidan remembered those horrible fifteen seconds he'd assumed he was dead, and the physical pain he'd felt as Cortez read off the list of injuries: punctured lung; fractured ribs; shattered tibia, collarbone; ruptured intestines; fried cybernetics in his face. He remembered the fourteen week coma, and the groans of pain as Shepard finally surfaced from the sea of anaesthetics and painkillers.

Kaidan closed his eyes forcefully, opened them, and put his arms around Shepard, doing his best to forget the memories thundering through his mind, or the throbbing pressure building in his skull.

* * *

><p>Shepard's head thumped.<p>

The dream, whatever it had been, was a bad one. He tried not to think about dreams—the worst he'd ever had was one in which he'd beaten Ashley to death with a baseball bat, whilst gleefully (gleefully? He hadn't understood how or why) firing repeated rifle blasts into Kaidan's abdomen.

A pang of guilt rose in his stomach, and manifested itself as a mouth full of bile.

He tried to call for Kaidan, his arms flailing behind him, but all that would come out of his mouth was a torrent of foul, pungent, burning vomit.

Shepard coughed and tried to right himself, but ended up tumbling with a hard _thud_ to the floor, shaking, covered in vomit and retching. He frantically tried again to get up, but managed to fold himself backwards onto his leg, only then remembering the the was incapable of standing.

He gasped for air as he heard the bathroom door slide open, and saw a familiar shadow rush out from it. He fought back (and lost against) an explosive sneeze as Kaidan gently lifted him upright.

And, not for the first time, Admiral Shepard wailed in his own frustration.


End file.
